Women's Leadership Style

Written by Allison Shirreffs Tuesday, April 27 2010

As co-authors Sally Helgesen and Julie Johnson collected research for their latest book, The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, they noticed a trend: Women were leaving jobs that, at least from the authors’ perspective, looked desirable. They wondered why. “The women were all saying the same thing,” Helgesen recalls, “That it’s not worth it.”

What did that mean, “It’s not worth it?” And why were talented, highly skilled women dropping out of the work force at a faster rate than men? To find answers to these questions, Helgesen and Johnson set out to quantify how men and women perceive, define, and pursue satisfaction at work. While they found many similarities between men and women, they also discovered, Helgesen notes, “a certain disconnect between what organizations expected and what women, at their best, had to offer.”

For instance, Wall Street culture may not deliberately discriminate against women, but it may reject leaders whose values aren’t focused on money and power. “If you want that, you sacrifice everything else,” Helgesen says. “Is it a surprise that you end up with a culture that promotes the most greedy people?”

Lately, much has been written about the benefits of leadership traits that are typically regarded as feminine (such as a collaborative, democratic approach that rewards rather than reprimands) and whether or not organizations whose leaders possess these feminine qualities are better off.

According to Alice H. Eagly, professor, social psychology, Northwestern University, the answer is, “It depends,” she says. “I don’t want to say it’s not true. It’s slightly true.”

In her book Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders, Eagly and co-author Linda L. Carli, associate professor, Wellesley College, explore why the number of women in power remains rare and why their presence in leadership positions still evokes a sense of wonder. “It’s not a good argument [to say] that women have a better leadership style than men,” Eagly states, adding that it’s also not factual to say women make worse leaders than men. It is, however, accurate to say that women have a more difficult time towing the line between being assertive and being demure.

According to “Diversity and Leadership in a Changing World,” an article co-authored by Eagly and Jean Lau Chin, dean, Derner Institute for Advanced Psychological Studies, Adelphi University, female leaders are expected to take charge – just like their male counterparts.

But they’re also expected to “deliver the warmth and friendliness that is culturally prescribed for women,” the authors write. “Simultaneously impressing others as a good leader and a good woman is an accomplishment that is not necessarily easy to achieve, and common pitfalls involve seeming to be ‘too masculine’ or ‘too feminine.’”

Twenty years ago, Helgesen published, The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership. She wrote the book in part because she felt women were getting bad advice. They were being told, essentially, to leave their values at home and conform to the workplace. Women were finally making it into the executive suite, but once there, others had expectations about how they should behave.

But meta-analyses of men and women’s leadership styles don’t show a dramatic difference between genders. What the data illustrate is that transformational leaders – leaders who stand for what’s good about the organization and behave as such, who are good teachers and coaches who care about their employees as individuals and who can inspire and motivate them to do their best, are optimal to lead today’s modern organizations, Eagly says. “To a small extent, women manifest these qualities more than male managers,” she adds.